Recently I had answered this question on Stack Overflow. The OP was satisfied with that answer and has accepted it.

After that, on a daily/weekly basis, he/she is asking child questions based on the parent one. I did answer his/her query one/two times, but he/she has taken advantage of that and keeps asking the same questions even though I had advised regarding this.

It seems that the OP is polluting that post, and that comment conversation would not help the future readers too. What should I do in this context? I don't want to behave harshly in this situation.

@gnat: What does this question have to do with that one? This question is about an asker harassing an answerer, and that one... I don't even know how that is relevant to this one. At all.
– BoltClock♦May 14 '14 at 11:04

1

@BoltClock I misread at the first sight (retracted my vote). It's help vampire indeed, not a chameleon question
– gnatMay 14 '14 at 11:06

30

It's interesting that a 2K user on SO who has answered over 100 questions (and judging by the scores, seems to do ok at that) is acting like a Help Vampire, and hasn't learn how annoying it is to be pestered by someone to help in a different (but maybe related question)
– psubsee2003May 14 '14 at 11:08

6

A quick glance at his comments activity shows that this is something he does relatively frequently: "@userThatSolvedOneProblem, please look at this other problem of mine"
– brasofiloMay 14 '14 at 12:21

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The answer here couldn't be simpler. The magic words are: "Hey nice question, but post that as a new question ok? Cheers" It's just that simple, @Rajaprabhu. If you look through my posts I've said it zillions of times over the decades.
– FattieMay 14 '14 at 12:54

2

@JoeBlow Yeah i too advised like you many times, some of them will get the point but few of them will again continue asking the queries by adding up the words like please , i'll be grateful , i'll be thankful. So basically hanging up the conversation at those moments will be some what difficult.
– Rajaprabhu AravindasamyMay 14 '14 at 13:02

the most and only annoying things about this are the notifications.. other than that I would just ignore the OP.
– user2140173May 15 '14 at 7:39

6

Just say 'Please post this as a new question and I'll answer it - I am trying to optimize my reputation score.'
– jwgMay 15 '14 at 8:20

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"Cheers" can mean "good bye", (or "see ya"), or other things depending on context including as an aside meaning "thank you for whatever you just did or said, now let's continue this conversation". Relying on so-called "code" words to indicate something to people who may not speak the same dialect of English as you is not going to work.
– nnnnnnMay 15 '14 at 13:29

1

Happens to me all the time: I try to help them to not be rude and sound like I'm trying to boost my rep...
– AstroCBMay 18 '14 at 16:58

7 Answers
7

First and foremost, you are never under any obligation to answer a user's questions just because they have asked you to look at them. This is entirely up to you.

That being said, however, comments should always be relevant to the question or answer at hand. If a user keeps veering off-topic in comments, flag the offending comments and remind them to stay on-topic and to avoid lengthy conversations.

If they continue asking you to look at their other questions or otherwise drag you unnecessarily away from the original topic, flag for moderator attention and explain what the user has been doing, and we will speak to the user about it. Then walk away; do not engage them any further beyond asking them to stop.

In this case, since you've posted here, I've gone ahead and contacted the user, so there is no need to flag the post in question.

Oh, are you guys looking for more flags? Not staying sufficiently busy? I usually just ignore those comments. Help vampires don't have much of an attention span, they give up pretty quickly.
– Cody Gray♦May 14 '14 at 11:28

18

@Cody Gray: Don't know, several months ago we had a user who persisted over about half a year. The poor guy had half a year's worth of comments on a single answer from the same OP. You have no idea how persistent some people can be. They are the folks that demand our attention most, if anything.
– BoltClock♦May 14 '14 at 11:28

@BoltClock Half a year of questions without answers, or was he getting answers that encouraged him?
– Warren DewMay 14 '14 at 12:22

@Warren Dew: Half a year of commenting at the same user on the same answer.
– BoltClock♦May 14 '14 at 12:23

1

@BoltClock But were his comments the only ones in that half year, or were others commenting too? If others were commenting too, it doesn't say anything about the effectiveness of Cody Gray's strategy of the answerer's abandoning the comment thread.
– Warren DewMay 14 '14 at 12:27

2

@Warren Dew: He and the answerer were the only ones - the latter had informed him repeatedly to knock it off but he continued. To be fair it wouldn't have dragged on for so long had the answerer known to flag comments, but without flagging it for mod attention it wouldn't have clued the OP in one bit on how their behavior was problematic.
– BoltClock♦May 14 '14 at 12:35

4

@BoltClock Okay. I think it would have been more effective to ignore him and quit responding to the comments after the first request to knock it off. A lot of these people act like little kids - even bad attention is better than no attention as far as they are concerned.
– Warren DewMay 14 '14 at 12:38

@BoltClock: I've read the links, but I still don't think I'm understanding what a "help vampire" is. Is it someone who's intentionally constantly trolling the site to waste everyone's time? Is it someone who's really lazy/naive and asking silly questions ("how do I build an OS?")? Is it someone who's constantly posting duplicate questions because he doesn't realize it? or is it something else? I haven't ever recognized an instance of this happening so I can't tell what it really means...
– MehrdadMay 18 '14 at 8:57

@BoltClock: I also don't understand, how can a user depend on another particular user for answers? When you post a new question, there's no way to "notify" another user about it, so I just don't understand how you can depend on someone to answer your question...
– MehrdadMay 18 '14 at 8:59

2

@Mehrdad: A help vampire is just someone who continuously posts questions that have little to no effort just to get spoonfed answers because that's precisely what the community will do, whether they are aware of it or not, and without ever showing any signs of growing or learning how to ask better questions.
– BoltClock♦May 18 '14 at 9:11

1

@Mehrdad: Simple, they comment on a post belonging to the other user with a link to their question.
– BoltClock♦May 18 '14 at 9:12

1

There are beginners that might be quite lost and seek too much guidance, that i tend to excuse. For help vampires, not even reading your answer before asking the next piece of code, what i did more than once is to delete my answer and any comments i made. Like disappear. It's even more a walk away solution, one that cannot fail.
– GameAlchemistMay 19 '14 at 23:35

I don't want any moderator comment-deletions on this but on one of my answers, OP actually started acting as a help vampire so I just kindly let the asker know to create a new question on SO because the commenting is fruit-less.

I've had other questions in the past in which the comments seem endless so when I've had enough I kindly tell them something along the lines of:

I appreciate your interest in my help but these comments have gone far outside the scope of your initial question which I believe to have answered adequately. If you found my initial answer helpful then please mark it as accepted. Feel free to start a new question on SO with your new issue(s) and link me to it if you wish.

That's perfectly acceptable (if only because I do the same sometimes). Just be careful because some users might take it to mean that they can start depending on you primarily or exclusively for answers.
– BoltClock♦May 14 '14 at 12:31

@BoltClock very good point but I am going to assume that it is a much more frequent issue for a 231K contributor than a lowly 4k'er =)
– MonkeyZeusMay 14 '14 at 12:39

I've been fortunate enough to not have to deal with it myself - I'm stating my observation as a moderator more than a 231k user :)
– BoltClock♦May 14 '14 at 12:40

It is a bigger problem for niche tags, where there aren't a thousand other people looking at the question that will post an answer within a few minutes of it being asked.
– Cody Gray♦May 15 '14 at 12:34

4

@CodyGray Then I should definitely be concerned because PHP/jQuery/JavaScript is about as niche as it gets!! =)
– MonkeyZeusMay 15 '14 at 12:36

@Qantas94Heavy: Pestering a user to accept an answer is bad. Letting them know that you aren't planning to play the game of "answer not accepted because I expanded the question" is perfectly fine.
– Ben VoigtMay 22 '14 at 23:44

Please post it as a new question because I don't know the answer and,
if you post a new question, you will receive attention from more people
than just me

Drawing the focus to the fact that continuing to post on an old (and perhaps accepted) answer will never get the interest from other answerers seems to be very effective. These people search the widest audience possible for their problem.

There's a pretty good bet that the 'Russian Doll' question can be detected by pattern enquiry...

The SO software has a trigger that fires when a comment trail reaches a certain length. At the moment it says something like "Continue this in the chat room".

The trigger can be amended to something like...

if (Commenter == QuestionAsker && QuestionAsker.Comments.Count > 5 && Answers.Count>0)
then Prompt = "Is this related to the original question? New questions should be posed as such"
else Prompt = (same as now)

And perhaps at least SOME help vampires will get the point.

If nothing else, it exposes the SO consensus to the "asker", and lots of members would be grateful for that.

Whenever I get in this situation, I either stop answering the questions - the questions will stop once the asker stops getting answers - or gently suggest that the asker post a new question for his new concern, optionally letting others answer the new question instead of me so as to disengage.